Tues 19 July, Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff

words: GARETH LUDKIN

★★★★☆

Darkly satirical and intensely absorbing, The Infant is an excellent piece of theatre from the critically acclaimed Les Enfants Terribles theatre company that challenges perceptions of truth, suspicion and accusation and interogation.

The performance opens with a masked individual sat tied to a chair on a darkly lit stage. The audience is swiftly thrust into a hostage situation with assailants Castagan (Martyn Dempsey) and Samedi (Anthony Spargo) quizzing Cooper (James Seager), a hostage who has been seized and presented with a piece of incriminating evidence thought to hold consequences too terrible to even comprehend. We are informed that the evidence (a simple piece of paper) contains a picture construed as a blueprint for the destruction of society. When Cooper proclaims that he thinks his four-year-old son drew the picture, a web of accusation, suspicion and disbelief ensues as the interrogators Castagan and Samedi draw in Cooper’s wife (Faye Billing) into their questioning.

Who drew the picture? The audience are left none-the-wiser as to the content of the picture while the wild and bumbling pair starts accusing Cooper of drawing the picture. Soon they attempt to implicate and twist the words of Cooper and his wife as they pursue their own theories. Innocently caught in the middle Cooper and his wife are left confused and doubting whether their son actually is innocent. Attempting to save their own skin the pair are even prepared to drop their own son – or indeed each other – in trouble.

The sparse and uncomplicated set allows the audience to hone in on the bumbling, manipulative, shrewd, judgemental and suspicious characters at the centre of this simple but engaging plot. Both Martyn Dempsey and Anthony Spargo produce fantastically engaging performances as Castagan and Samedi. Spargo in particular produces a livewire performance which perfectly captures his duplicitous nature.

The performance confounds our appreciation of how we the look at the creation and manipulation of fact and fiction, asking the audience to question what is truth and how far we would go to save ourselves from the truth. The plot reeks with satirical wit, with its terrorist plot implications and subtle critique of interrogation providing an intriguing backbone to an absorbing hour and a half of theatre.